Fwd: NASA wants to lasso asteroid

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From: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Date: April 6, 2013 11:05:39 AM GMT-06:00
To: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Subject: FW: NASA wants to lasso asteroid

 

NASA has plan to capture an asteroid and tow it to the moon

The plan calls for astronauts powered by a new monster rocket to land on the asteroid in just eight years

April 5, 2013

ORLANDO - Tucked inside President Barack Obama's proposed federal budget for next fiscal year is about $100 million to jump start a program scientists say is the next step towards humans establishing a permanent settlement in space.

That, at least, is what U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson says we're likely to see when the White House unveils its fiscal year 2014 budget around the middle of next week.  Nelson has been briefed by scientists.  And NASA's decision to ask for funding for the project was first reported by Aviation Week magazine in an article published last week.

In a nutshell, the plan in NASA's hands calls for catching an asteroid with a robotic spacecraft and towing it back toward Earth, where it would then be placed in a stable orbit around the moon.

Next, astronauts aboard America's Orion capsule, powered into space by a new monster rocket, would travel to the asteroid where there could be mining activities, research into ways of deflecting an asteroid from striking Earth, and testing to develop technology for a trip to deep space and Mars.

"This is part of what will be a much broader program," Nelson said today, during a visit in Orlando.  "The plan combines the science of mining an asteroid, along with developing ways to deflect one, along with providing a place to develop ways we can go to Mars."

It was Nelson (D-FL) with former U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) who won passage in Congress in 2010 for funding plans to build a new monster rocket – called SLS - capable of carrying the Orion spacecraft and for or more astronauts out of low-Earth orbit and to the far side of the moon.  The U.S. hasn't had the ability to do what this new rocket will do - go far beyond low-Earth orbit and lift gigantic payloads - since 1972 and the end of the Apollo Moon program.

Now comes an audacious plan that would use the rocket in just eight years on a manned mission to the captured asteroid.  A similar plan was first suggested last year by space experts at the California Institute of Technology.  The institute was joined in preparing a detailed feasibility study by other institutes, think tanks, laboratories and universities, including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, The Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Their jointly produced Asteroid Retrieval Feasibility Study suggests that bringing a 500-ton asteroid closer to Earth would give astronauts a "unique, meaningful and affordable" destination for the next decade.

Nelson said he thinks NASA's plan is very similar and that President Obama favors it, as the president already has announced a goal of sending astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025.  This plan would advance that date by four years to 2021.

"It would be mankind's first attempt at modifying the heavens to enable the permanent settlement of humans in space,"  scientists have said in the feasibility study.

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Senator: NASA to lasso asteroid, bring it closer

By SETH BORENSTEIN | Associated Press

 

View Photo

Associated Press/John Raoux - FILE - In this Jan. 13, 2013 file photo, the Orion Exploration Flight Test 1crew module is seen in the Operations and Checkout building during a media tour at the Kennedy Space …more 

WASHINGTON (AP) — NASA is planning for a robotic spaceship to lasso a small asteroid and park it near the moon for astronauts to explore, a top senator said Friday.

The ship would capture the 500-ton, 25-foot asteroid in 2019. Then using an Orion space capsule, a crew of about four astronauts would nuzzle up next to the rock in 2021 for spacewalking exploration, according to a government document obtained by The Associated Press.

Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., said the plan would speed up by four years the existing mission to land astronauts on an asteroid by bringing the space rock closer to Earth.

Nelson, who is chairman of the Senate science and space subcommittee, said Friday that President Barack Obama is putting $100 million in planning money for the accelerated asteroid mission in the 2014 budget that comes out next week. The money would be used to find the right small asteroid.

"It really is a clever concept," Nelson said in a press conference in Orlando. "Go find your ideal candidate for an asteroid. Go get it robotically and bring it back."

This would be the first time ever humanity has manipulated a space object in such a grand scale, like what it does on Earth, said Robert Braun, a Georgia Institute of Technology aerospace engineering professor who used to be NASA's chief technology officer.

"It's a great combination of our robotic and human capabilities to do the kind of thing that NASA should be doing in this century," Braun said.

Last year, the Keck Institute for Space Studies proposed a similar mission for NASA with a price tag of $2.6 billion. There is no cost estimate for the space agency's version. NASA's plans were first reported by Aviation Week.

While there are thousands of asteroids around 25-feet, finding the right one that comes by Earth at just the right time to be captured will not be easy, said Donald Yeomans, who heads NASA's Near Earth Object program that monitors close-by asteroids. He said once a suitable rock is found it would be captured with the space equivalent of "a baggie with a drawstring. You bag it. You attach the solar propulsion module to de-spin it and bring it back to where you want it."

Yeomans said a 25-foot asteroid is no threat to Earth because it would burn up should it inadvertently enter Earth's atmosphere. These types of asteroids are closer to Earth — not in the main asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars. They're less than 10 million miles away, Braun said.

"It's probably the right size asteroid to be practicing on," he said.

A 25-foot asteroid is smaller than the size rock that caused a giant fireball that streaked through the sky in Russia in February, said Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart, head of the B612 Foundation, a nonprofit concerned about dangerous space rocks.

The robotic ship would require a high-tech solar engine to haul the rock through space, something that is both cutting-edge and doable, Braun said. Then NASA would use a new large rocket and the Orion capsule — both under development — to send astronauts to the asteroid.

There would be no gravity on the asteroid so the astronauts would have to hover over it in an extended spacewalk.

Exploring the asteroid "would be great fun," Schweickart said. "You'd have some interesting challenges in terms of operating in an environment like that."

Nelson said the mission would help NASA develop the capability to nudge away a dangerous asteroid if one headed to Earth in the future. It also would be training for a future mission to send astronauts to Mars in the 2030s, he said. But while it would be helpful for planetary defense, "that's not your primary mission," Schweickart said.

George Washington University Space Policy Institute Director Scott Pace, a top NASA official during the George W. Bush administration, was critical of the plan, saying it was a bad idea scientifically and for international cooperation.

Instead, NASA and other countries should first join forces for a comprehensive survey of all possible dangerous space rocks, Pace said.

The government document describing the mission said it would inspire because it "will send humans farther than they have ever been before."

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Online:

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov

The Keck Institute plan: http://www.kiss.caltech.edu/study/asteroid/asteroid_final_report.pdf

B612Foundation: http://b612foundation.org

 

Copyright © 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. 

 

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     Apr. 5, 2013 9:14 PM   |  

 

NASA wants to lasso asteroid, tow it home

Orion crew would explore it beyond moon orbit

In this artist's concept, an astronaut performs a tethering maneuver at an asteroid. Orion spacecraft would fly a crew to the asteroid and hover nearby but not land. / NASA

Written by
Todd Halvorson
FLORIDA TODAY

CAPE CANAVERAL — President Barack Obama next week will ask Congress to accelerate plans to send U.S. astronauts to an asteroid, moving up to 2021 the nation's next grand goal for human space exploration, officials said Friday.

First, scientists would identify an asteroid, and in 2019, a robotic spacecraft would snare the space rock and tow it back to an orbit on the far side of the moon two years later.

Then, on the first piloted flight of NASA's Orion spacecraft, astronauts would rendezvous with the asteroid and perform spacewalking investigations. The mission would take place four years ahead of a 2025 challenge Obama issued in April 2010.

It would shed light on the origins of the solar system and, officials said, enable the U.S. to develop technologies required for future human expeditions to Mars.

And officials said it could help the U.S. develop capabilities to save the world – to divert any Earthbound, planet-killing asteroid in ways that only Hollywood can now.

"If we ever had the doomsday scenario . . . this would also give us the ability to develop the technologies of capturing or nudging (a threatening asteroid)," said U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Orlando.

And that's important, Nelson said.

An asteroid slamming into Earth near the Siberian city of Chelyabinsk in February created an energetic release equal to 300,000 tons of TNT, rocking the entire region and injuring more than 1,200 people. It was the most devastating asteroid crash on Earth since the 1908 Tunguska Explosion, also in Siberia.

"You can see what kind of damage those things can do," said Nelson, the chairman of the Senate subcommittee on Science and Space. "You can imagine an asteroid that is three or four times that size, and if it were coming right down on a city, it would level the city."

The Obama administration is scheduled to deliver its proposed fiscal year 2014 budget to Congress on Wednesday. Buried deep within it will be a $100 million request that would start up the accelerated human expedition to an asteroid.

"NASA is in the planning stages of an innovative mission to accomplish the president's challenge of sending humans to visit an asteroid by 2025 in a more cost-efficient and potentially quicker timeframe than under other scenarios," said a senior government official who was not authorized to speak publicly about the plan before the proposed 2014 budget is unveiled next week.

 

The official said the mission would use the heavy-lift rocket and deep-space capsule that have been under development for several years.

 

Government documents obtained by FLORIDA TODAY show the $100 million in start-up money would be invested in targeting a candidate asteroid for capture.

 

In a news conference with Nelson on Friday, a reporter termed the amount "measly." But NASA's Commercial Crew Program, which aims to develop private-sector means of transporting astronauts to and from the International Space Station, started with $50 million divvied up between five companies. Now it's one of NASA's highest-priority projects.

 

The total cost of the robotic asteroid retrieval and human expedition is unclear. But no landing spacecraft is required — astronauts would do spacewalking sorties from Orion capsules — so the price tag is expected to be in line with NASA flagship missions.

 

"Whether the cost is $1 billion or $1.5 billion, I don't know," said Louis Friedman, a co-leader of a privately funded asteroid retrieval feasibility study conducted at Keck Institute for Space Studies in Pasadena, Calif. "It's certainly not $5 billion, and it's certainly not $500 million. I'm suspecting the answer is going to be in the range of $1 billion to $1.5 billion. That seems to be what people think at this point."

 

NASA's Mars Curiosity rover mission is costing $2.5 billion.

 

The prospect of establishing a solid goal for U.S. human spaceflight and advancing the timeline is invigorating people involved in mission planning, evoking memories of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs.

 

"I got in on the ground floor on this, and it was all pretty fantastic when it started," said former NASA astronaut and veteran spacewalker Tom Jones, a feasibility study participant.

 

"Feels like the 1960s again. You know, here's an idea that two years ago didn't exist, and now it's a can-do, we-can-do-it kind of project," Friedman said. "I think it's very exciting."

Contact Halvorson at thalvorson@floridatoday.com

Copyright © 2013 www.floridatoday.com. All rights reserved. 

 

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By William Harwood / CBS News/ April 5, 2013, 10:36 PM

NASA mulls asteroid capture mission, eventual manned visits

An Orion spacecraft designed for deep space exploration is shown in Earth orbit. A proposed NASA mission to capture and haul a small asteroid back to Earth's vicinity could be a target for manned visits by the early 2020s. / NASA

NASA is working on plans to robotically capture and tow a small asteroid back to Earth's vicinity by the end of the decade, setting the stage for manned visits to learn more about the threat asteroids pose, the resources they represent and to help perfect the technology needed for eventual flights to Mars.

Play Video

Can asteroids be tracked and deflected?

 

"This is part of what will be a much broader program," Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fl, said in a statement late Friday. "The plan combines the science of mining an asteroid, along with developing ways to deflect one, along with providing a place to develop ways we can go to Mars."

According to a mission overview obtained by CBS News, the rationale for the proposed asteroid retrieval project is based on NASA's long-range goals of advancing technology development; providing opportunities for international cooperation; developing new industrial capabilities; and helping scientists better understand how to protect Earth if a large asteroid is ever found on a collision course.

• Lawmakers to discuss dangerous asteroids, meteors in hearing today
• United Nations reviewing asteroid impact threat

The program also would help NASA develop the navigation, rendezvous and deep space operations experience needed for eventual manned flights to the red planet.

"I hope it goes forward," said Rusty Schweickart, a former Apollo astronaut who helped found the B612 Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to building and launching a privately funded space telescope to search for threatening asteroids.

"Asteroids are a very, very interesting area," he told CBS News in a telephone interview. "They're a hell of a resource, and I think the potential for long-term resource development for use in space is going to be a very big thing. And this is sort of step one. It's a baby step in a way, but it should be very interesting."

As for the threat asteroids pose to Earth, Schweickart said "I don't want people to spend their nights worrying about getting hit by asteroids. But I do want them to encourage their political leaders to invest in the insurance, which will allow us to prevent it from happening."

Play Video

NASA answer to killer asteroids: "Pray"

 

Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine first reported the proposed asteroid retrieval mission, saying NASA's fiscal 2014 budget request would include $100 million to get the project underway.

"Suggested last year by the Keck Institute for Space Studies at the California Institute of Technology, the idea has attracted favor at NASA and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy," Aviation Week reported. "President Obama's goal of sending astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025 can't be done with foreseeable civil-space spending, the thinking goes.

"But by moving an asteroid to cislunar space -- a high lunar orbit or the second Earth-Moon Lagrangian Point (EML2), above the Moon's far side -- it is conceivable that technically the deadline could be met."

Louis Friedman, former director of the Planetary Society and a co-author of the original Keck study, said the proposed mission "is quite an exciting idea" that supports President Obama's 2010 call for sending astronauts to an asteroid.

Play Video

Asteroids: Real danger or sci-fi?

 

"It turns out, a first mission to an asteroid is still a big step, too big a step, because you'd need a much larger launch vehicle than we're building, you'd need a crew support system that could last for at least nine months in space because of the round-trip time," Friedman said in a telephone interview. "If we have to wait for that, it would be a couple of decades.

"But the nice idea here is we can robotically move the asteroid closer to Earth and do the mission as soon as ... the 2020s, the goal is 2025. By moving the asteroid here, we have a much safer, earlier first step for humans going beyond the moon."

The mission has "both technical advantages and scientific advantages because we're actually exploring an object instead of going to empty space," he said. "It also has an excitement about it because we get the robotic mission, which is a very interesting idea, moving an asteroid close to Earth ... and then sending astronauts up to visit it."

The Keck study estimated a cost of about $2.65 billion to capture and return a carbonaceous asteroid roughly 20 feet across. NASA officials had no official comment Friday and the mission outline obtained by CBS News did not include cost estimates.

But the proposed NASA project closely follows the Keck scenario. The outline indicates a three-pronged approach, starting with enhanced efforts to identify suitable targets. The idea is to find a number of near-Earth asteroids roughly 20 to 30 feet in diameter in favorable orbits that would permit capture and transport to Earth's vicinity.

"The only real question when you come right down to it is the size, because obviously as you get smaller and smaller and smaller, it becomes more and more feasible to do it," Schweickart said. "As you get smaller, the biggest problem you have is knowing where the heck to find one. We don't have a lot of seven-meter objects in our database."

But multiple candidates are needed "because any kind of a schedule slip and that asteroid that you were going to go to may not be back for 15 or 20 years," Schweickart said. "So you need to have a whole set of these things."

Along with improving asteroid detection, NASA hopes to start work on developing a robotic spacecraft based on a 30-kilowatt to 50-kilowatt solar-electric propulsion system that could rendezvous with the asteroid, capture it in a bowl-like receptacle and maneuver it back to Earth's vicinity.

A "notional" timeline in the mission overview shows a test flight in the 2017 timeframe followed by a rendezvous and capture mission in 2019. The asteroid then would be hauled back to cislunar space by around 2021.

Asteroids roughly the size of the desired candidate hit Earth's atmosphere on a regular basis and typically break up harmlessly in the atmosphere. For comparison, the meteor that exploded over Russia in February -- the largest known body to strike the Earth in a century -- was roughly 50 feet across.

In any case, the proposed mission outline indicated any effort to move even a small asteroid back to Earth's vicinity would be built around a fail-safe trajectory that would result in a lunar impact, at worse, if anything went wrong.

The third element of the proposed program would utilize NASA's Orion crew capsule and a new heavy-lift booster to ferry astronauts to the asteroid for an up-close examination and sample return.

Two NASA teams currently are studying the proposed mission. One is focusing on identifying suitable asteroids and developing the unmanned systems needed to capture and return a candidate to Earth's vicinity. The other is studying manned rendezvous and sample-return scenarios.

"There is much forward work to do to better characterize the cost, schedule and mission requirements, and focus an observation campaign to find candidate asteroids," according to the mission outline. "The study work will be done in FY 2013. Many key out-year elements are already in the budget."

Friedman said the proposed mission would be reminiscent of the Apollo moon program, "of having humans go to a celestial object and make measurements that are of interest to various scientific communities."

In the wake of the Russian meteor and a larger asteroid that passed close to Earth the same day, Friedman joked, "if you're not interested in asteroids, what are you interested in?"

© 2013 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

 

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NASA to Get $100 Million for Asteroid-Capture Mission, Senator Says

by Mike Wall, SPACE.com Senior Writer

05 April 2013 Time: 05:16 PM ET

 

 

 

An artist's illustration of an asteroid retrieval spacecraft capturing a 500-ton asteroid that is about 7 meters wide. CREDIT: Rick Sternbach/Keck Institute for Space Studies View full size image

NASA will likely get $100 million next year to jump-start an audacious program to drag an asteroid into orbit around the moon for research and exploration purposes, U.S. Senator Bill Nelson says.

The $100 million will probably be part of President Barack Obama's federal budget request for 2014, which is expected to be released next week, Nelson (D-FL) said. The money is intended to get the ball rolling on the asteroid-retrieval project, which also aims to send astronauts out to the captured space rock in 2021.

"This is part of what will be a much broader program," Nelson said Friday (April 5), during a visit to Orlando. "The plan combines the science of mining an asteroid, along with developing ways to deflect one, along with providing a place to develop ways we can go to Mars."

NASA's plan involves catching a near-Earth asteroid (NEA) with a robotic spacecraft, then towing the space rock to a stable lunar orbit, Nelson said. Astronauts would then be sent to the asteroid in 2021 using NASA's Orion capsule and Space Launch System rocket, both of which are in development.

The idea is similar to one proposed last year by researchers based at Caltech's Keck Institute for Space Studies in Pasadena.

"Experience gained via human expeditions to the small returned NEA would transfer directly to follow-on international expeditions beyond the Earth-moon system: to other near-Earth asteroids, [the Mars moons] Phobos and Deimos, Mars and potentially someday to the main asteroid belt," the Keck team wrote in a feasibility study of their plan.

NASA will need much more than this initial $100 million to make the asteroid-retrieval mission happen. The Keck study estimated that it would cost about $2.6 billion to drag a 500-ton space rock back near the moon.

Nelson said he thinks the Obama Administration is in favor of the asteroid-retrieval plan. In 2010, the president directed NASA to work to get astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025, then on to the vicinity of Mars by the mid-2030s.

News of the potential $100 million allocation is not a complete surprise, as Aviation Week reported late last month that NASA was seeking that amount in 2014 for an asteroid-retrieval program.

 

Copyright © 2013 TechMediaNetwork.com All rights reserved.

 

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Space Cowboys: NASA's newest project aims at corralling asteroid

This image is from the last sequence of images NASA's Dawn spacecraft obtained of the giant asteroid Vesta, looking down at Vesta's north pole as it was departing. When Dawn arrived in July 2011, Vesta's northern region was in darkness. After more than a year at Vesta, the sunlight has now made it to Vesta's north pole, which is in the middle of the image. This is not an asteroid related to the latest announced proposed missions. (NASA Image / April 5, 2013)   By Mark K. Matthews, Washington Bureau

5:19 p.m. EDT, April 5, 2013

WASHINGTON — It's been a while since NASA's been known as a place for space cowboys.

But the nickname could make a comeback if the space agency can pull off a new mission that even supporters admit sounds buck-wild: corralling an asteroid with a spacecraft so future astronauts can go visit it.

Obama administration officials said the operation has the potential to jump-start a human-exploration program that has floundered since the 2011 retirement of the space shuttle. The White House will include $105 million to begin work on the project in its 2014 budget to be unveiled this week.

"This mission will send humans farther than they have ever been before, and [it would be the] first ever redirection of [an] asteroid for exploration and sampling," noted NASA officials in a mission outline presented to Congress this week and obtained by the Orlando Sentinel.

If lawmakers approve, the plan calls on NASA to launch an unmanned spacecraft as soon as 2017 on a mission to "capture" a small asteroid and drag it near the moon, possibly to a point roughly 277,000 miles from Earth where competing gravitational forces would allow it to "sit" there.

Astronauts, riding a new NASA rocket and capsule, then would visit the asteroid as early as 2021.

"If the American people are excited about it, they [lawmakers] will be, too," said U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla. — adding that he thinks the public is "fascinated" with asteroids thanks to disaster movies such as "Armageddon" and recent near-misses that real space rocks have had with Earth.

But the plan faces several hurdles — and not just the rocket science.

Foremost is convincing Congress, and a skeptical public, that spending an estimated $2.6 billion on the mission is a worthwhile investment. That's in addition to the $3 billion annually that NASA already devotes to building its new Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule.

Then there's the more-basic question of why.

"You have to get over the first shock, and I'm worried editorial writers will be like: 'Huh? You lost your mind,'" acknowledged Lou Friedman, who co-authored a 2012 report that suggested the idea. "But if you get into it, [the mission] is audacious as sending humans to the moon. I think it will restore confidence in America's technological capability and NASA's can-do spirit."

As proposed, the asteroid mission would begin with research — $78 million in 2014 to begin design work on the robotic spacecraft that would capture the asteroid, and an additional $27 million to begin searching the cosmos for an asteroid to grab. The ideal rock would be 20 to 30 feet in diameter and weigh 500 tons.

A 2012 study done by the Keck Institute for Space Studies, a think tank based at the California Institute of Technology, envisioned a small probe that would launch aboard an Atlas V rocket. Once in space, it would use its solar-electric engines to cruise to an asteroid and then attempt to capture it in a cup-shaped container described as an "inflatable asteroid capture bag."

Even NASA admits this stage would be the "most technically challenging aspect of the mission," as the asteroid would be traveling at thousands of miles per hour and spinning rapidly. The probe would have to first match the asteroid's speed and spin. It would then position itself so that the asteroid drifts into its storage space — and pull it shut like a drawstring bag.

"Since the asteroid would be much more massive than the spacecraft, it is perhaps better to think of this as the asteroid capturing the spacecraft," noted the Keck study.

The probe would then tug the asteroid to an orbit near the moon to await a visit by NASA astronauts. The Keck study estimated the whole operation could take six to 10 years, although NASA officials insist they can do it sooner to meet their 2021 deadline of a human mission.

By any measure, it's an ambitious operation that would test a wide variety of NASA skills — from technology development to human spaceflight.

But there's still the question of why.

From NASA's perspective, the mission checks several boxes.

First, it gives purpose to the huge new SLS rocket and Orion capsule that are costing NASA about $3 billion a year to build, with a first test flight scheduled no earlier than 2017. The SLS has been criticized as a "rocket to nowhere" — as its mission has been defined only vaguely since the program's 2011 unveiling — and the asteroid operation would give it a specific goal.

It also would meet President Barack Obama's challenge to NASA to visit an asteroid by 2025.

Finally, its estimated cost of $2.6 billion, not including the SLS and Orion, fits within NASA's long-range-budget expectations. It would be much cheaper than a manned flight to the moon's surface or a longer-range mission to an asteroid that hasn't been tugged close to the moon.

"It gives us a place to go but one we can reach with existing systems," Friedman said.

It's the kind of rationale that makes sense in the space community.

But NASA likely has some work to do in convincing the general public. Though the flight would make history, sending astronauts to a tiny asteroid lacks the punch of, say, a Mars landing.

Supporters said they understand that. But they argue that getting to Mars — or even doing more on the moon — would be impossible without intermediate steps such as this. Asteroids are "interesting objects in their own right, but the main purpose is as a stepping stone of exploration," Friedman said

Planning documents also make another case: The spacecraft developed by NASA could be a prototype of one that could defend the planet against a rogue asteroid. That's been a hot topic since a 55-foot asteroid exploded over Russia in February, injuring more than 1,000 people, and NASA acknowledged to Congress it would be helpless if a larger, more-deadly asteroid were reported on a collision course with Earth.

There's also the possibility of mining the asteroid for rare materials such as platinum. Though it's unknown whether visiting astronauts would set foot on the asteroid, it's certain any mission would recover rock samples. This could be a first step in developing techniques to mine asteroids in the future.

The rise of this program, however, likely means the death of another.

NASA chief Charlie Bolden pitched the White House last year on the idea of building a small space station near where NASA intends to drag the asteroid; administration officials said that pricey proposal has been shelved in favor of one viewed as more viable given NASA's annual budget of about $18 billion.

"We've had a succession of [human-spaceflight] missions that didn't pan out financially; it would be nice to have one that did," said Howard McCurdy, a space-policy expert at American University.

mkmatthews@tribune.com or 202-824-8222

Copyright © 2013, Orlando Sentinel

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